Fast approaching last call at McGlinchey’s Bar in Center City. I’m in a booth guzzling bargain whiskey, conversating with my best-friend-since-middle-school, Aaron, and his girlfriend, Ari. Aaron and I share a Lucky Strike – the new filtered kind, so not without a twinge of shame – and Ari has her American Spirits. Frogs by Alice in Chains starts to play; Ari and I turn to Aaron with knowing smiles, because it’s one of his favorites, and he’s a sucker for Touch Tunes.
The first round of drinks was on them, and now our glasses are getting low, and it’s almost 2:00 a.m. Up to the bar I go. The bartender is busy with the last call rush, so I plop down on a barstool next to a fifty-something, rough-around-the-edges African American man. He wastes no time breaking the ice. I quickly learn that it’s his birthday, which is a bummer, because here he is sitting in McGlinchey’s at an ungodly hour, alone and penniless. He asks me if I’ll buy him a birthday beer. Of course I will.
By the time the bartender gets around to us, I’ve learned that not only is the lonely birthday boy down and out, but he also has somewhere important to be the next day, so he’s going to need some cash in addition to the beer. It’s a cash-only bar and, in an effort to catch the bartender’s eye, I’ve been holding a wad of dough out over the counter. Point being, the man to my right has reason to believe he’s not wasting his time.
The bartender asks him what kind of beer he wants, and he asks the bartender what the options are, and apparently this is an impossible burden for the bartender to bear, because shoulders start shrugging and eyes start rolling. “Just get him a Coors,” I say, not wanting smoke from the bartender’s ears to start polluting McGlinchey’s pure tobacco haze. Eventually the man gets his Coors, and I get two more $2.75 Jameson shots for me and Aaron and a Jameson and ginger for Ari. At this point, I’m tempted to flee the scene and leave the man with his birthday beer, but I’m a softy, and lonely old men and panhandlers have a sixth sense for that sort of thing, so he keeps pressing and I keep sitting.
He’s had back problems and PTSD ever since he served overseas. He’s multitasking as he mumbles all this to me, pulling out a wallet and showing me his ID, as if this little plastic rectangle with his picture on it renders credible his every word. Suddenly, he stops storytelling – perhaps I didn’t seem as sold as I should have – and he looks me square in the face, and he starts speaking a bit more forcefully.
“Do you respect my service?”
“Yes sir.”
“Do you think black lives matter?”
“I do.”
“Good,” he says, nodding and pausing.
I had already been planning to spot him the train fare before he launched that line of questioning, so, unsure what he was going to come at me with next, I interject and say “look, here’s the rest of my cash. I’m gonna take these drinks back to my friends, but happy birthday, and good luck with your trip tomorrow.”
He thanks me, and I start standing up with my fistful of liquor, but he’s not quite ready to let me off the hook. He gives me a sideways glance and out comes “so, do you swing both ways?”
I try unsuccessfully to fight off the smirk spreading across my face as I let a sharp puff of air escape my nostrils: “no sir, I don’t.”
“Oh,” he says, “it’s pretty common now. A lot of people do it. I have a few times.”
“Yep,” I say, “I know a few people who do so myself… anyway, my friends are waiting on me. Have a good one.”
And I’m back in the booth with Aaron and Ari, and I’m telling them about the Veteran, and we’re rushing through our drinks, and we’re off into the night.
(I crashed at their place. In the guest bed.)
Afterthoughts
(1) You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Keep shooting, Vet.
(2) Here’s a good article delving into homelessness in Philly and recent efforts to address it.
(3) Here’s some Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan content offering a comedic window into how the phrase “Black Lives Matter” can be abused for manipulative purposes.
(4) This anecdote strikes me as an odd illustration of intersectionality… right-wing “respect my service” grift intersects with left-wing identity politics grift. When it comes to panhandling potency: (black veteran) > [(black) + (veteran)].
An incredible account of a once in a lifetime encounter.